How did we get here?
by atom-of-ice
Summary: Zim reflects on his lack of enthusiasm for the coming invasion.


Zim was confused.

He didn't really understand how he'd gotten to this point. Indeed a mere three years ago he would have been jumping around like one of those filthy earthling elementary school children who'd been force fed coffee, energy drinks, candy, and crack if what was happening right now had happened then.

The Irken armada was in a decaying orbit around the sun with the intention to intercept earth's orbit suitable slowly to allow the humans enough time to notice its approach and despair but fast enough that they would be unable to do anything about it. He had to hand it to his former leaders; they had really gotten this whole 'see your doom and despair' thing down.

He was sitting in the lab under his house watching the armada's inexorable plodding course across the line of Pluto's orbit. The green alien leaned back in his observation chair and tried to sort out where he had lost his taste for conquest.

Now that he was thinking about it, it had really started only a couple months after arriving on Earth. The seeds of dissent had been sown when he'd tried to reduce Dib's intelligence by going into his brain in a microscopic SIPCV (Standard Irken Personal Combat Vehicle).

That mission had been a disaster. He'd managed to delete Dib's knowledge of the disk that held photographic proof of his off-world origins. In that sense it had been success. By changing the mission objectives for a more debilitating victory for Irk had resulted in the near termination of his own existence and the loss of his SIPCV. He'd been beaten by another humanoid robot piloted by Gaz.

At first he'd thought that Dib had managed to pilot the ship despite his arms being disabled. This was actually a source of grudging respect for Dib from Zim until he'd found out that Gaz had been the pilot. Zim chuckled slightly to himself as he thought about the weeks and months that he'd spent after that incident discreetly testing Dib's skill as a pilot and revising his theories about how the neurotic boy had done it the first time after every disappointingly easy victory over him at the controls of another vehicle.

At first Zim had thought that Dib had been delayed by having to remove his shoes with his teeth before using his toes to pilot the craft. That was later revised after seeing Dib crash yet another ship by accidentally hitting the wrong pedals sending the ship yawing into a tree.

Next Zim considered that Dib had neural implants that had allowed him to interface with the robot directly through his nervous system. That was dangerous Zim knew because of the tendency for the feedback of having the robot destroyed tended to burn out the pilot's nerves. Zim himself had spent several days in a convalesce ward at the end of his advanced pilot training having nano-bots restore his own burnt spinal nerves. A later comprehensive remote brain scan including full spectrum transmission analysis proved this theory to be false.

His final theory before learning the truth had been that Dib's incessant monologue-ing had granted him unsurpassed dexterity with his tongue and he had used that to pilot the craft. It would come as no surprise to anyone but Dib that this had been the theory that had lasted the longest and been the one that Zim thought most believable.

Once he learned that Gaz had been the pilot he began trying to draw her into his almost regular spats with Dib in hopes that she would get tired of Dib's incompetence and take the controls so they might match each other once again at the controls of their chosen robotic proxies.

It had taken a long three weeks of introspection to come to terms with the fact that he desperately wanted to pilot against Gaz for the sole purpose of entertainment. He had been shocked speechless and incapable when he realized that he was spoiling for a fight not to take over this planet and species but to be challenged as a pilot, something that hadn't happened since beginning pilot training.

It was many months after this realization that Zim finally integrated with his Pak which brought forth a whole plethora of new and disturbing issues. He had thought that his body was the Irken and that his Pak was merely there to help. It sported a collection of helpful gadgets that would make the manufacturers of Swiss Army Knives green with envy and it generally just stuck to his back like another part of him; like a human appendix only more helpful, he didn't think he needed it but it was there and there was no reason to take it off.

In reality an Irken invader was an amalgamation of Pak and genetically engineered host. The body was the result of hundreds of years of Irken genetics experimentation to create the perfect host for the Pak. Zim was what the Tallest would consider an abomination. The Pak was supposed to be the only sentient part of an Irken, a highly developed AI that had consumed the civilization that had created it to fight their intergalactic wars for them and had never stopped fighting. Zim however was missed when the consciousness of the smeet was supposed to be wiped. This happened ever so often and usually these anomalies became the leaders of the Irken Empire as their burgeoning consciousness was twisted and molded by the Pak's AI. But where Red and Purple had been twisted into the cruel narcissistic beings they were, Zim's Pak hadn't activated properly.

Zim's smeet was of Invader stock. Zim's Pak was of scientist stock. When Zim was pushed into the Invader training program the subroutines for his Pak didn't activate leaving Zim to learn all that it meant to be one of the most feared warriors in the galaxy and all the skills that would take him there without the help of a parasitic AI to help him along.

Zim had turned out to be a prodigy at operating any vehicle. His command of Operation: Impending Doom 1 had been entirely thanks to his prodigious skill at piloting SIPCV's throughout pilot training. After the epic failure he was banished. During his banishment he encountered a lot of machinery that could be improved to increase functionality, this had served to activate his long dormant Pak AI.

When he returned to claim a part in Operation: Impending Doom 2, his Pak and self hadn't synced and the result was an Irken that didn't function well at either job that he supposedly was qualified for.

When he and his Pak had finally synced Zim had become the most dangerous Invader ever created due to his full training in two complementary disciplines. However, the resulting information he and his AI gained by cross-referencing all their respective knowledge had given light to the Irken birthing procedures in such a way as the two consciousnesses could only call it the sustained, persistent system of mass murder of infants.

That was three and a half years ago. He'd gone into total psychic shock for the better part of six months. He had been unable to do anything except sit in his lab staring at his computer screen. It was only luck that had kept him alive during that time. His Pak had driven him to upgrade and customize nearly everything he touched or used regularly even before they had merged and the extensive updating of his house's software had overwritten its instructions to terminate traitorous, ineffective, or disabled invaders. Zim's incessant meddling with GIR had resulted in a robot with a caring AI that had slowly made its way from not worth the scrap it was built from into something resembling competent. The house had informed GIR of his master's condition and the little robot had taken Zim to the sick bay and had hooked him up to life support before toddling off to find Gaz and Dib (he assumed that since Zim talked about them so much that they were Zim's friends).

The two new middle skoolers had come immediately (Gaz to get out of class. Dib to gloat.). GIR explained as much as he knew about the situation which, Zim reflected, went a long way towards creating the situation he found himself in now.

GIR explained to Gaz (as he held a struggling Dib with a brand new set of metal tentacles which had sprouted from his back at the urging of his newly updated protection subroutines after they detected Dib's heightened aggression and deemed the obsessed alien hunter a threat to Zim in his master's weakened condition) that Zim had been playing around with Dib trying to get her to fight against him in another robot battle instead of taking the standard destroy the world and leave the glassed floating ball orbiting the sun to serve as a new Irken parking lot.

Gaz had been very interested in the opportunity to have a rematch with a coherent Zim rather than the utterly shocked and unresponsive one he'd been in their first fight inside Dib. She agreed, with much more eagerness as she had ever shown anyone, to a rematch as soon as he woke and promised to keep Dib in line and make the green alien's excuses to his teachers until such a time as he recovered.

It was during this time of recovery that the medical bay's upgraded software and tools decided that Zim's body should be improved so that while Zim was unresponsive for the foreseeable future the time spent in the sick bay wouldn't be a total wash. When Zim awoke he found that the number of optical cells that covered the outside of his eyes had been vastly increased (Irken eyes didn't focus through a lens but were covered in optical cells similar to the ones on the back of human eyes allowing them to see everything within their field of view without having to focus on it, similar to taking a continuous high resolution digital photo of their surroundings). His antennae, which functioned as both his nose and ears, had similarly been increased in sensitivity. The most surprising change came when he stepped off the bed and found he'd grown significantly taller. He'd been thankful after going back to Skool that everyone else had seemed to have a growth spurt and he hadn't been freakishly tall.

Zim smiled lightly once more at the thought of his height (a rather frightening sight really given his mouth was full of viciously pointed teeth instead of the predominately blunt ones found in a human mouth). He hadn't stopped growing after the alteration. He was a freshman in Hi Skool now and stood a towering 6'1", though he was pretty sure he was going to stop there (if he'd cared to look it up he would have found out that he was taller than the Tallest Red and Purple and that with his antennae uncovered by the wig he usually wore he was 6'8")

The next three years had been spent in a fierce rivalry with Gaz and smacking Dib around when he got annoying with increasingly infrequency.

Six months ago two landmark events happened: his rivalry with Gaz had exploded and somehow ended in them attempting to suffocate each other using only their tongues (a thoroughly pleasant way to go Zim thought after the experience) and the message stating the Irken armada was in route to Earth.

Which brought Zim back to the present: watching the slowly oncoming armada in all its pink and purple glory.

"Computer, pack up the house and call GIR. I'm going to run over to Gaz's house to pick her up. We might be able to stop the invasion or she'll take over the Empire either way we probably will be moving."

"Yes sir"

Zim stood up and walked over to the pneumatic elevator. He was pretty sure that he could just reactivate GIR's dormant invader protocols aimed at the armada if it all went south but he was sure that Gaz would want to see the ensuing chaos. _Maybe we can try that new style of fighting we always seem to end on lately, that rubbing thing she was doing against me last time felt great._

--

AN: Just some drabble that escaped an Invader Zim marathon.

news in the event anyone cares: I'm working on several stories but I'm not going to post them until their finished but they should be fairly spectacular for me when their finished. Two Naruto stories and a Harry Potter story. I'm up to 115 pages on the Naruto story I'm concentrating on but it's far from finished. The other two stories are just for when I've got other ideas that don't mesh with my main story or when I get tired of writing about ninjas. I don't know when they'll be finished I just thought I'd let the people who are looking at this account that I've not died yet, though college is giving its best shot at murdering me.

Atom-of-Ice


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